From the Archives: A History of Roll-Top Desks and Tambour Doors

27 August 2026 Stan

This is an excerpt from Fine Woodworking #13, Winter 1978

Click here to read the full digitized issue.

Writing desks, whether for business or household, need a larger work surface than one might otherwise desire in the room. They also need some means of rapid closure, whereby clutter and important papers may be concealed from snoops, protected from thieves, or merely swept out of sight when guests arrive. The usual solution, found on all manner of furniture since the 17th century, is a hinged flap that becomes a writing surface when open and a locked door concealing drawers and pigeonholes when closed.

The falling flap (often called “slant top”) is direct and straightforward in construction, although a variety of ingenious means of supporting the opened flap have been devised. Its two disadvantages, if such they may be called, are that the working clutter must be cleared off the writing surface before the desk may be closed up, and that the flap is of necessity flat. Many designers would not consider this flatness a handicap, but it apparently troubled the master cabinetmakers at the court of Louis XV (1723–1774) of France.

Their answer, probably the creation of Jean-Francois Oeben (1720–1763), was the “secretaire a cylindre,” the cylinder bureau or roll-top desk. Oeben’s masterpiece was made for his patron, Louis XV, and quickly became known as “Ie bureau du roi,” the king’s desk. The French court at that time was the center of high fashion, and the desk with its broadly curved top receding into a slot above the pigeonholes was widely imitated.

The king’s cabinetmaker and the king himself shared a passion for mechanical devices. Typical of Oeben’s work are complicated locking devices and mechanisms that release or raise drawers by hidden processes. Louis XV devoted a considerable amount of time to his own workshop and hobby, the then-fashionable practice of ornamental lathe turning. He had one of the world’s first elevators installed at Versailles in 1743, for the convenience of Mme. de Chateauroux. A little later, he commissioned “tables volantes,” which, by rising and sinking through the floor, enabled him to entertain without the intrusion of servants.

Whether the cylinder desk was an original idea on the part of Oeben is difficult to answer. The earliest description of such a mechanism dates from about 1760, although something like it can be seen in an engraved design for wall decoration from about 1750. The source may have been Oeben’s early experiments, or Oeben may have picked up the idea from elsewhere. In any case, Oeben’s work is the first documented example of furniture of this type.

Begun in 1760 , the desk took a full nine years to complete. Upon Oeben’s death in 1763, Jean-Henri Riesener (1734–1806), his first journeyman or foreman, married Oeben’s widow, carried on the workshop, and completed the important work left by the master. (It was common in the 18th century for a cabinetmaker’s widow to remarry in this way.)

Oeben had left the desk in a fairly advanced stage of construction, with the working mechanisms completed. Riesener can be credited with the lavish pictorial marquetry of holly, boxwood, purpleheart, and other exotics. He hired specialty craftsmen to complete the clock, Sevres porcelain plaques, gilt bronze sculptural figures, and ormolu mounts that unite to make the desk a tour de force of French decoration . Its completion in turn established Riesener as a worthy successor to Oeben. His monogram has been found on several other spectacular cylinder desks now in prominent collections. One is at Buckingham palace, another is in the collection of the Duke of Bedford, and two are in the Rothschild collection at Waddesdon Manor.

Desks with fall flaps often had cupboards or drawers above the writing surface and were of architectural scale in a room. The early cylinder desks were often of a similar scale, matching the large writing tables inherited from the first half of the century. But the fashion soon turned to smaller, less formal furniture, made for wealthy patrons who preferred the intimate life of the boudoir to the formal salons of an earlier generation. Cylinder desks were more suited to the smaller scale, and as they became smaller they also became daintier, more delicate in character.

There were exceptions to this trend, notable among them a large roll-top attributed to David Roentgen (1743–1807), master cabinetmaker to Louis XVI, which was made around 1785 for Catherine II of Russia. Roentgen, like Oeben, was famous for mechanical ingenuity, and his works are full of springs that release panels and uncover secret drawers.

By about 1780, the French fashion had taken hold elsewhere, aided no doubt by warfare throughout central Europe that deposited German artisans at all the royal courts. Many of the prominent cabinetmakers of Paris were German emigrants known for their skill at marquetry, who returned to the small German courts of the electoral princes when hostilities subsided, taking the latest fashions with them. The cylinder fall writing table became popular in London about the same time, with a number of designs featured in such books as Thomas Shearer’s Cabinet Maker’s London Book of Prices (1788) and Thomas Sheraton’s Drawing Book (1791–1794) and Cabinet Dictionary (1803). Sheraton explains that the place of the familiar slant-top desk had been ” amongst fashionable people” taken by a secretary or bureau with a roll-top or cylinder front. He uses the term “cylinder desk and bookcase” to describe an elegant, light piece mounted on tapering legs, with the drawers and pigeonholes enclosed by a tambour front and supporting a low case of shelves with square doors. A similar piece is illustrated by George Hepplewhite in the Cabinet Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide (1788), where it is called a “tambour writing table and bookcase.”

By the time the design reached Sheraton, the cylinder top had been connected via an iron trammel to the writing surface, which automatically slid out as the top was raised. Sheraton supplies the first written description of this mechanism with clues about how to make it. The plates in his drawing book show great fertility of imagination. Some have a low arched top containing small unenclosed drawers, others retain open shelves with brass galleries, and several are surmounted by china or book cupboards with glazed doors. Still others have extra writing slides that pull out from either side of the frame. These desks, lighter and simpler than their predecessors, often had tamboured roll-tops.

The original cylinder was a rigid quarter-round pivoting on a concealed bracket, usually guided by a tongue on the edge, which ran in a semicircular groove. It opened into a slot above the pigeonholes and disappeared behind them. Cylinders were usually made of two or more full-width staves of wood, edge-glued and planed to a circular arc, then veneered. Some were guided by a solid rail tongued across the ends of the boards, a more stable construction, while others had tongues worked directly on the boards themselves. Because it was rigid, the shape could only be an arc of a circle, sometimes a full quarter-circle, more often a sixth-circle, and as much space had to be left behind the cylinder as in front of it. This necessitated a bulky design, and also forced the pigeonholes or drawers to be foreshortened to fit the cramped space. Making a quarter-cylinder is basically the same as making barrels, and the cooper is the likely source of the technique.

It wasn’t long before some cabinetmaker, probably in France, observed that the boards of the cylinder didn’t have to be glued together into a rigid shape. They would still follow the curve, and other curves as well, if they were glued to a flexible backing. The usual backing is stout canvas, although sometimes a strong wire is threaded through a hole in each tambour instead. The slats could be made very small (and would then follow a very tight curve), they could be molded into an interesting variety of profiles, or they could be left flat and veneered just as if they were solid, and the veneer subsequently slit. Tambours enjoyed great popularity in England (where they were often called reed tops) and gave rise to a welter of new designs.

When used to replace the cylinder fall, the tambour has the advantage of requiring little space at the back, for when opened it will drop behind the pigeonholes in a straight line. Tambours also can be fitted horizontally to cover an opening like shutters, replacing the usual doors. Tambours that slid sideways were found to be satisfactory on all manner of small pieces other than desks where no great strength or security was required, including sewing cabinets, the lower cupboard of sideboards, and bedside tables.

When used on large pieces, however, tambours do have disadvantages: They are insecure, and they are liable to injury, often requiring repair. Both cylinder tops and reed tops in general have suffered the ravages of too-constant use over the centuries. Many French flat desks, according to one antique dealer, started life as cylinder desks. They appear in today’s shops with their tops removed. One of the loveliest tambours in existence occurs on an American Federal mahogany sideboard, made in Baltimore c. 1795–1800. This elaborate Sheraton-style sideboard was ordered by David van Ness for his country house on the Hudson and is one of the most elaborate pieces of furniture executed in the United States. Its huge tambour structure conceals elaborately fitted containers for knives and forks. Baltimore produced furniture that closely followed English precedents because it was settled almost entirely by the English and Irish. Its furniture was based primarily on pieces featured in Hepplewhite’s Guide (1788) and Shearer’s Book of Prices. Unknown in other areas of the United States was the highly individual style of lady’s writing desk, derived from plates 44 and 47 of Sheraton’s Drawing Book (1793): Such Baltimore desks were elaborately decorated and always had a folding top or a roll-top.

The cylinder form was also popular in the cabinetmaking centers of Massachusetts. In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, there is a group of cylinder and tambour desks by John Seymour (c. 1738–1818), an English emigrant whose work owes much to the elegant styles of Sheraton and Hepplewhite. The Winterthur Museum houses a group of cylinder desks from Baltimore, Salem, Pennsylvania, and New York.

Because the revolving top was a great convenience for hurriedly hiding papers from indiscreet eyes, the appeal of the cylinder desk increased during America’s Empire period (1815–1840). In the 1890s, manufacturing firms in Grand Rapids and elsewhere turned out roll-tops by the dozens, some of mammoth proportions constructed for the American businessman. During this “Golden Oak” period, Sears Roebuck catalogs contained ads for “curtain-top desks.” These roll-tops had spring locks, with “all drawers locking automatically when the curtain top is pulled down.” Such a desk, 5 ft, wide, sold in 1897 for $20. And in the first two decades of this century, even Gustav Stickley, the father of the Arts and Crafts movement in America and a strict individualist in design who despised reliance on traditional forms, made concessions to public taste-he occasionally made roll-top desks for offices.